Snapshot of a year

by | Jul 19, 2024 | Alumni, Art History & Visual Studies, climate, donor, Faculty, Graduate, indigenous, News, Research, School of Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, Writing

We’re excited to share with you the latest edition of the Faculty of Fine Arts Annual Review. While it’s always difficult to encapsulate an entire year’s worth of activity into a single 36-page magazine, we do enjoy the creative challenge of sharing our top stories with you!

“This past year, colleagues continued to reconceptualize the contours of arts education, creative expression and scholarly knowledge,” writes Dr. Allana Lindgren in her introduction. “The arts continue to be essential for cultivating dexterity through creative thinking and fostering the empathy needed to navigate our increasingly complex world.”

Dean Lindgren also notes the ongoing inspiration Fine Arts students provide. “Their commitment to creativity continues to inspire me and gives me confidence that the next generation of arts leaders has the temerity to transform life’s challenges into opportunities for intellectual reflection and artistic innovation.”

Inside, you’ll find a variety of stories about the recent activity of our faculty, students, staff, donors and community partners.

Education equates with action here in Fine Arts: we are committed to helping our students cultivate the skills needed to become innovative artists and engaged leaders.

Our curriculum, artistic practices, research and creative activities are rooted in our belief in the power of creativity, experimentation and the efficacy of the arts to help us to understand and address today’s most urgent and vexing issues.

If you missed a previous Annual Review, issues dating back to 2017 are archived here.

Remembering guitarist Alexander Dunn

by | May 13, 2024 | Award, Faculty, News, School of Music

It is with profound sadness that we share the news that our friend and School of Music colleague, Dr. Alexander Dunn, passed away unexpectedly on the morning of May 8. “This is a loss that will be deeply felt by members of our School and the wider music community,” says School of Music director Alexis Luko. “On behalf of the School of Music, our deepest condolences go out to Alex’s to loved ones, family, friends and colleagues.”

His sudden passing at just 68 was marked in this May 11 Times Colonist article, which quoted his cousin and lifelong guitar partner Robert Ward as saying, “even in high school, [Alex] was singled out as having a really unique talent.” Ward and Dunn performed together in Boston as recently as April 20, with Ward noting he was in fine health, good spirits and played magnificently. “It was a brilliant performance,” Ward told the TC. “We had a great time playing what was a very difficult program.”

An enviable musical legacy

Beyond spending nearly 34 years at UVic building one of the strongest guitar programs in Canada, Alex also served as president and artistic director of the Victoria Guitar Society, the board of examiners for the Royal Conservatory, and worked as an instructor at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, and at the University of California, Irvine.

“This news is a great shock to the classical guitar world and leaves a chasm in the Victoria guitar scene, where Alex was instrumental in bringing us an amazing array of performers over the years,” posted the Victoria Guitar Society. “We will always remember Alex for his passion for music and his talent at passing this knowledge down to new generations. We’ve lost a friend and an artist.”

An internationally renowned guitarist, Alex was the recipient of UVic’s Sessional Lecturer Teaching Excellence Award in Fine Arts (2019/20), and he received the Provost’s Advocacy and Activism Award (2019) for his work in bringing the Orontes Guitar Quartet from Syria to UVic as visiting artists.

International respect

A virtuoso performer, acclaimed teacher, dedicated mentor and enthusiastic supporter of emerging young talent, Alex was a frequent guest performer at international guitar festivals and a popular adjudicator and competition judge across North America. He was also a protégé of internationally acclaimed flamenco guitar master Pepe Romero, with whom he toured.

“His sight reading and analytical skills are phenomenal,” Romero noted on Dunn’s website. “One need only to bring up his name in the guitar world, and you will sense immediately the respect he commands.” As the TC article notes, Dunn hosted several fundraising concerts by Romero in Victoria, and was instrumental in arranging for his former instructor and mentor to receive an honorary doctorate from UVic. Romero regards Dunn as one of the finest teachers he has encountered. “When I think of Alex, I think of a musician’s musician — a man who commands a vast knowledge of the repertoire,” Romero wrote. “He seems to know more about lute and early music than most specialists.”

Alex was also the recipient of an Institute of International Education grant and the prizewinner of the Internationaler Wettbewerb Freiburg. As a performer, he enchanted audiences across North America and worldwide in South America, Europe, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Mexico, Cuba, South Africa and New Zealand.

With a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a PhD in musicology from the University of California, San Diego, Alex also spent extensive summer studies at the Aspen Music Festival and the Salzburg Mozarteum.

Dunn with the Orontes Quartet in 2018

Advocacy & Activism

Alex passionately advocated so that people who come from less fortunate backgrounds could excel—a perfect example of this advocacy and activism was his effort in 2018 to bring the Orontes Guitar Quartet to UVic from war-torn Syria.

After the classical guitar ensemble were denied entry to the US in 2017 due to the ongoing Syrian travel ban, Alex spent nearly 18 months working with two US-based organizations — the Artist Protection Fund (APF), an innovative initiative of the Institute of International Education, and the non-profit organization Remember the River — to secure the Orontes a placement at UVic.

As the Canadian arm of Remember the River — a non-profit organization that brings guitars to refugee camps in the Middle East — Alex had already been helping send guitarists into impoverished communities, including on some First Nations. Building on that experience, he helped the Orontes Guitar Quartet escape war-ravaged Syria and to come to UVic to work under his mentorship. He described it at the time as “an exhilarating experience”. 

“Knowing that a group of musicians on the other side of the world — connected by common interests but separated by the chasm of human rights abuses and the outrages of war — was life-changing,” he said. “Suddenly the abstraction of religious and cultural conflict occupied my thoughts in a very real way.”

As a result, the quartet performed across Canada in numerous events supporting refugees and people from war torn countries, bringing a unique narrative of music surviving in times of violence and war. For his efforts, he was named one of just two recipients of UVic’s 2019 Advocacy & Activism Awards (below)

Alexander Dunn with UVic’s Director of Equity & Human Rights Cassbreea Dewis (left)
&  fellow award winner Sage Lacerte, plus then-VP Academic & Provost Valerie Kuehne

Join the Fine Arts e-news

by | Jan 22, 2024 | e-news, Events, News

Did you know that we offer over 150 events a year here in UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts? From concerts, exhibits and plays to readings, artist talks, guest lectures, film screenings and more, all our events are open to the public — and many are free!

But how can you find out about what we’re offering? It’s simple! Just sign up for our monthly Coming Up in Fine Arts email and we’ll keep you in the loop. (And it is just an easily-skimmed email — no pics or ads included.)

Usually sent out on the first of each month, Coming up in Fine Arts offers quick summaries of upcoming event highlights in Art History, Theatre, Visual Arts, Writing and the School of Music — complete with dates, times, locations and relevant links. (Sometimes we’ll send out two CUFAs a month, depending how much activity is going on.) We also include a short media roundup, as well as news about student and alumni activity too.

Don’t miss out on what may well be your favourite event of the year—join the hundreds of other who are already know what’s Coming Up in Fine Arts.

But if you’re looking for something more specific, we also offer separate e-news mailings for both Theatre (Backstage Pass) and the School of Music (E-Pulse).

Fine Arts in the news: media roundup

by | Jan 17, 2024 | Alumni, Art History & Visual Studies, Award, climate, Faculty, Graduate, indigenous, News, School of Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, Writing

When it comes to announcements, publications and media appearances, there’s never really a slow time for Fine Arts faculty, alumni and students — and the past couple of months have been no exception. Here’s a quick roundup of who’s been speaking with the media lately.

 

Art History & Visual Studies

In this December article for Forbes magazine, professor Catherine Harding comments on the use of AI in identifying another artist involved in a 16th century painting by Raphael. “It is wonderful if we can use AI in this way,” Harding said. “It won’t be irrefutable. It will depend entirely on the expertise of the people doing the programming, but if they can write the right kind of algorithm, it will be very useful.”

As part of the new Jeffrey Rubinoff Nexus for Art as a Source of Knowledge, professor Allan Antliff has been selected as the inaugural Rubinoff Legacy Professor. This named professorship is just one facet of $230,000 in new funding from the Rubinoff Foundation, which also includes 15 annual graduate student scholarships and the expansion of experiential learning initiatives at Hornby Island’s Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park. Read more in this announcement.

Professor Carolyn Butler Palmer and Visual Arts professor emeritus Lynda Gammon were interviewed on this Jan 6 segment of CBC Radio’s North By Northwest in support of Gammon’s Latent exhibit at Legacy downtown, which is curated by Butler Palmer. There is also an accompanying short visual story with pictures in this issue of the NXNW newsletter.

Adjunct professor Martin Segger recently wrote this fantastic Times Colonist piece about the history of not only Centennial Square but the overall planned design of Victoria’s downtown district.

Adjunct professor Grace Wong Sneddon co-curated the recent exhibit The Magic of Tony Eng (with local historian John Adams) for the Chinese Canadian Museum in Fan Tan Alley. A goal for this museum is to recognize Victoria’s Chinese Canadians and, as such, Eng is an ideal subject: a vibrant and active member of the city, many remember him as a charismatic stage magician, teacher and mentor to generations of local magicians. In other news, Wong Sneddon recently co-authored two chapters in a new book, Diversity Leadership in Education: Embedding Practices of Social Justice (2024, edited by UVic’s Catherine McGregor & Shailoo Bedi): “Unpacking the Equity Myth: Diversity & Leadership Deficit” (with Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay) and “Race and Gender: Chinese Canadian Women and Leadership” (with Lokpriy Shrma & Tremblay).

Alum India Young is cited in this Vancouver Sun article about a career retrospective exhibit by Nuu-chah-nulth artist George Clutes at Vancouver’s Bill Reid Gallery; the exhibit was created by Young plus UVic’s Andrea Walsh and Jennifer Robinson.

School of Music

Marking their official retirement from performing, the “trailblazing” Lafayette String Quartet were recently profiled in this feature article from Strings Magazine. “I hope we’ve instilled a deep love of chamber music in our audiences and students,” said Ann Elliott-Goldschmid. Our students benefited enormously from observing four musicians who respect each other and worked together, unified, in overseeing their studies and musical growth.”

Ahead of his final concert featuring live piano accompaniment to a silent film, professor Bruce Vogt was interviewed by CBC Radio’s All Points West (not archived) and in this Times Colonist story. “I’m certainly not retiring from playing,” said Vogt. “I just won’t be teaching any more. I’ll still be around, until I hear the chimes at midnight.”

January’s masterclass with guest mezzo-soprano Allyson McHardy got a shout-out in this Times Colonist roundup.

Professor Benjamin Butterfield plus alumni Isaiah Bell and Timothy Carter all appeared on this segment of CBC Radio’s On The Island talking about their recent concert, Banned from the Concert Hall. Butterfield was also interviewed for this Times Colonist story about the same event. “I’m not sure everyone goes around talking about their arse all day in Baroque circles,” Butterfield said with a laugh. “But this type of thing has been around a long time.”

As the new leader of the annual TubaChristmas fundraiser, instructor Scott MacInnes was featured in this December Times Colonist article. “It’s awesome that such a lowly instrument can provide so much happiness,” said MacInnes, who will be conducting the festive ensemble for the first time.

Arbutus Middle School’s music program was recently announced as the winners—again—of CBC’s annual national Music Class Challenge. While not named in the article, Arbutus’s music program is led by alumni Jennifer Hill & sessional Michael Mazza.

Theatre

As co-author, professor Yasmine Kandil was recently announced as one of the winners of 2023’s Wayman Mullins Award for Best Journal Article, as awarded by the Society for Police and Criminal Psychology Board of Directors. This award is given for the best scientific article as published in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology. Kandil, along with co-authors Jennifer A. A. Lavoie & Natalie Alvarez, picked up the award for their article “Developing Community Co-designed Scenario-Based Training for Police Mental Health Crisis Response: A Relational Policing Approach to De-escalation”.

Alum Jena Mailloux (MA Interdisciplinary Studies: Applied Theatre/Curriculum & Instruction) recently published the article “Elevating Critical Pedagogy Through Dramatic Principles: A Comparative Framework Analysis of Anti-Bullying Drama Education and Theatre Research Initiatives” in the Drama Australia Journal.

Alum Alynne Sinnema (MA Applied Theatre) was recently awarded the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Robert G. Lawrence Scholarship for her for the project “Coming to her Senses: Women’s Sexual Empowerment Through Applied Theatre”, which the adjudicating committee found “inventive and insightful in the ways it aims to combine applied theatre, specifically physical theatre, and feminist theory as a way to support women’s voices, embodied and scholarly considerations of women’s pleasure and sexual agency, and mental health.”

Alum Narges Montakhabi was awarded the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) Heather McCallum Scholarship for her project “Politics and Poethics of Precarity in Contemporary Middle Eastern Canadian Theatre.” Describing her project as “ambitious”, the committee found her work “amplified the voices of less-heard and younger generations of underrepresented Middle Eastern Canadian playwrights, focusing on contemporary (mostly 21st century) plays and playwrights from Iran, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq.”

Visual Arts

Recent MFA alum Maryam (whose last name is not being used in the media due to safety concerns) was quoted in this Times Colonist story about her work in the latest Victoria Arts Council exhibit, You Are Welcome. “I’m still very impressed,” she said of the protests in Iran, where most of her friends and family reside. “The metal [in my piece] represents the strength and power of the women in my country when they were killed and shot in the streets.”

While the late-’90s children’s TV show Nanalan is currently going viral on TikTok, none of the coverage mentions the fact that professor Kelly Richardson worked on the show in between her BFA and MFA degrees. She worked on 71 episodes, making the set & greenery but also puppeteering; this allowed her to buy her first computer which entirely changed her art practice. “I’ve never really stopped making plants and animating bugs in my work,” she says. You can see some behind-the-scene photos Kelly has posted on her Instagram feed.

UVic Impact Chair Carey Newman was involved in the first fully bilingual colloquium of the New Uses of Collections in Art Museums Partnership  at the National Gallery of Canada in December. The conference outlined some of the innovative practices changing the standards and practices of art acquisition. This colloquium was jointly produced by the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) and the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO) as part of the CIÉCO Research and Inquiry Group’s Partnership New Uses of Collections in Art Museums.

In other news Carey Newman news, this Vancouver Sun article notes that the traveling exhibition of his Witness Blanket will be on display in the West Vancouver public library from Jan 26-March 8. This touring version is a detailed photographic replica of the original 13-panel sculptural installation, which is now permanently housed in Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Following this stop, the current 17-city tour next comes to the Saanich School Division (March 25–May 10) before moving on to Nelson and Nova Scotia, with more dates booking into 2025.  

Work by current MFA candidate Eeman Masood was featured in Frozen Forest, the recent curated exhibition at Abu Dhabi Art, and will also be displayed at the India Art Fair exhibition in New Dehli via her gallery representative Galerie ISA, from Feb 1- 4. 

 

Writing

Recent Writing grad and Climate Disaster Project managing editor Aldyn Chwelos was recently featured on this story for CBC Radio’s All Points West, speaking about their work documenting testimonials from survivors of severe wildfires and floods—some of which are getting a reprint in the December/January issue of Readers Digest. Chwelos was also featured in a separate interview with CBC Kelowna’s Radio West (not archived).

Teaching professor Marita Dachsel’s new essay collection Sharp Notions: Essays from the Stitching Life was mentioned in the Globe and Mail’s book gift guide for “The Mindful Maven” this year. “As the editors [Marita Dachsel and Nancy Lee] point out, in the 21st century we don’t need to knit, embroider, weave, bead, make lace or spin yarn. But what these essays by crafters get at, instead, is the nourishment found in the meditative (rather than productive) solace of fibre-arts handiwork.” Dachsel was also interviewed for this Vancouver Sun article exploring two new books with Vancouver Island fibre connections. Sharp Notions was also recently positively reviewed for The British Columbia Review, and it was included inAll Lit Up’s “Refresh Your Shelf: New Non-Fiction” list, which included five notable nonfiction reads for 2024.

Professor David Leach spoke with residents at two Isralei kibbutzim for this story for Jewish Renaissance Magazine. “In 2010, I completed a circuit around Israel to research a book about the founding ideals, hundred-year history and slow decline of the kibbutz movement,” writes Leach. “These 270 or so rural communes, dreamed into reality by young Jewish pioneers as a fusion of socialism and Zionism, had marked the borders of the future state and shaped many of its leaders and artists.”

Crookes Professor Sean Holman announced in December that Rappler — the Philippines’ leading digital media company — has published five students stories as part of the Climate Disaster Project Philippines, appearing just in time for COP28. As part of the CDP’s international outreach, UVic’s Division of Continuing Studies provides certificates to the Philippines students for their work in trauma-informed environmental journalism. All five harrowing stories can be read here, here, here, here and here.

MFA Sam Shelstad’s novel The Cobra and The Key was recently included on CBC Book’s list of “30 books to read this winter”. Things are getting meta with this new satirical novel, which is centred on the life of a writer (also named Sam Shelstad) who is busy working on a book about his failed relationship, while he awaits word from a publisher about the manuscript he’s sure will make him a star—a how-to book for aspiring fiction writers detailing the finer points of the craft.

MFA alum Kyeren Regehr has been named the new director of Victoria’s venerable Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series—which, at 28 years, is surely the city’s longest-running continuous literary series. PEP runs weekly, 7-9pm Fridays at Russell Books on Fort Street.

Fine Arts

UVic’s Fine Arts + Grants & Awards Librarian Christine Walde recently presented her book-themed art exhibit Salvage at the Bruce Hutchinson public library branch, in conjunction withthe Victoria Arts Council. Salvage is a collection of driftwood books salvaged from the beaches of Vancouver Island and the Cascadia bioregion of the Pacific Northwest over a ten-year period.

Did you know Fine Arts Dean Allana Lindgren hosts the pre-show talks for the DanceVictoria series? A dance historian herself, Lindgren speaks ahead of each show in the performance series.

Finally, the winners of our 2023 Student Community Impact Awards were mentioned in Monday Magazine’s coverage of the Greater Victoria Regional Arts Awards.

Zainub Verjee awarded Honorary Doctorate

by | Jun 14, 2023 | Alumni, Art History & Visual Studies, Award, News, Visual Arts

The Faculty of Fine Arts is thrilled to announce that Zainub Verjee will be awarded the Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts (DFA) at the 2023 Fine Arts convocation ceremony.

You can watch Zainub Verjee’s address to graduating Fine Arts students as part of the UVic convocation livestream starting at 2:30pm Friday, June 16.

Zainub has been a trailblazer renowned for her pursuit of art as a public good. An award-winning public intellectual and cultural diplomat, Zainub has led the way in shaping arts and culture by developing legislation and strengthening public discourse on the centrality of art in society.

Currently the Executive Director of Ontario Association of Art Galleries in Toronto and , she is an accomplished leader in the arts and culture sector and holds over four decades of experience in shaping culture policy at all levels of governments and has contributed to the building of cultural institutions and organizations in Canada and internationally.

An archival image of Verjee from her GG profile video 

A storied career

Born in Kenya, Zainub is a visual and media artist and a fixture in the Canadian contemporary art scene since moving to Canada in the 1970s. She continues to further the cause of arts practitioners, bringing attention to the needs of women artists, artists of colour and Indigenous artists, while shedding a bright light on the issues of labour in the arts, with her tenacious support for the sector during the most fraught times of the pandemic.

Zainub served as executive director of the Western Front, a Vancouver Contemporary Art Centre, co-founded the critically acclaimed In Visible Colours, and contributed to the prison theatre program at Matsqui, now shifted to William Head Penitentiary in Victoria; she was also integral to the formation of the British Columbia Arts Council.

A laureate of the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Zainub exhibits around the world.

“UVic and Fine Arts recognize Zainub’s outstanding achievements in scholarship, research, teaching and public service, and look forward to celebrating her as a Spring 2023 Honorary Degree Recipient,” says Dr Allana Lindgren, Dean of Fine Arts.

Climate Disaster Project inspires students to help build community of survivors

by | Jun 12, 2023 | climate, News, Undergraduate, Writing

A Climate Disaster Project participant visits Lytton BC after the town was devastated by wildfires in 2021 

Fires rage, storms blow, floodwaters surge, temperatures climb: as headlines about the latest environmental catastrophes appear with alarming regularity, it’s easy to feel like there’s little the average person can do. But UVic’s Climate Disaster Project is working to make a difference by using eyewitness accounts of climate survivors to create change and build an international community based on hope, trust and empowerment.

Working with partner institutions across Canada and around the world, the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) uses the model of an international teaching newsroom in order to train students in trauma-informed journalism techniques to collect, compile and share survivor stories.

“Speaking with people who have been affected by disasters — and hearing how they were able to move through that and counteract it — showed me just how much resistance is already happening on an individual and community level,” says fourth-year Department of Writing student and CDP participant Tosh Sherkat. “It gives me a lot of hope to realize that we have the resistance within us to come together and help each other to survive.”

CDP participants Tosh Sherkat (left) and Aldyn Chwelos

Having an impact

Funded by an initial $1.875 million donor investment and led by Sean Holman, a veteran journalist and the Department of Writing’s Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental and Climate Journalism, the project has already had a significant impact since launching in September 2021.

In the past academic year alone, 136 students were enrolled in CDP-related classes in nine different institutions (including UVic, First Nations University, Mount Royal University and Toronto Metropolitan University), learning about the human impacts of climate change, working to share those experiences with the news media, and investigating common problems and solutions identified by climate disaster survivors. New partnerships have recently been secured that will soon see the project expanded to Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway, Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa and the United States.

To date, Holman and his CDP team of students and recent grads have produced more than 120 stories in collaboration with disaster survivors worldwide, as noted in this overview of the Climate Disaster Project that ran in The Tyee.  

As well as sharing survivor stories through local and national media partnerships with the likes of The Tyee, Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), the Fraser Valley Current and both Asparagus and Megaphone magazines, CDP students also launched a verbatim theatre production, participated in Bournemouth University’s Global Media Education Summit, and collected stories as part of the Royal BC Museum’s Climate Hope exhibit.

“So often we talk about climate change as this existential thing we have to stop, that we have to prevent . . . but we’ve been saying that for decades and we’re in a worse position than ever,” says Writing student Aldyn Chwelos, a senior research associate and editor with the CDP.  “I feel so much less climate anxiety now because I’m actually working on this. Whether it makes a difference or not remains to be seen, but at least I’m doing something — talking to people, exploring solutions, figuring out how to get through this together — which feels different than just hoping it will all stop.”

Holman & Sherkat taking the survivor story of Suzanne Kilroy/Huculak

Making a change 

Both Chwelos and Sherkat were interviewed on the June 11 edition of What On Earth, CBC Radio’s award-winning national climate-solutions show (skip ahead to the 34:00 mark). 

“I think one of the biggest things I learned was to be bold with my empathy,” Chwelos told What On Earth host Laura Lynch in the interview. “This course is giving students the power to do that.”   

Sherkat told Lynch that the experience has had a profound affect on him. “It’s changed the way I feel about the future,” he says. “It’s renewed a sense of commitment in me to develop a sense of community strength and resilience in a meaningful way.”

A former competitive climber with Canada’s national youth team, Sherkat resigned after an experience protesting at Vancouver Island’s Fairy Creek old-growth logging blockade left him questioning the climate ethics of the international climbing world.

“It was a pretty difficult decision for me,” he admits, listing reasons including international travel requirements and the climbing community’s “rhetoric of being environmental stewards” compared to the actual toll outdoor rock climbing has on the environment. “Representing Canada and high-performance sports in general requires an attitude that’s hard to reconcile with climate-change action movements.”

Sherkat then enrolled in one of Holman’s CDP-related UVic classes in the hopes of making a positive difference, rather than having a negative impact. He says he’s still haunted by the experience of taking the testimony of Pacific Northwest wildfire survivor Suzanne Kilroy/Huculak. (“I couldn’t breathe,” she recalls in Megaphone. “I was coughing up blood . . . . There’s flames 100 feet high on one side of the highway and 50 feet high on the other side. We could feel the heat inside the car.”)

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget that,” he says. “She was such a fantastic storyteller and had so much drama from that, but also had so much love and light and hope for the future. When you bear witness to that kind of story, you also feel responsible for holding the love and hope.”

Chwelos at the RBCM’s Climate Hope exhibit

Witnessing a disaster

For their part, Chwelos was originally studying computer science and working in the tech industry when they realized they wanted to be doing something of more value. “I was working for a company that just wanted to make money,” they say. “I started rethinking how I wanted to fill my life and the work I wanted to do.”

Switching gears to an earlier love of writing, Chwelos enrolled in one of Holman’s CDP classes, where the entire class had to introduce themselves by saying how climate change had affected them.

“I’ve had asthma since I was a kid, and normally the summer months are great . . . but over the past few years the increasing wildfire smoke and pollen levels have meant I’m having more trouble breathing. Making that connection for myself was really interesting, realizing that a large portion of my life has been influenced by this problem,” Chwelos recalls. “Day one, it was all about reframing and realizing that climate change has a huge stamp on everything. And the whole point of the project and Sean’s class was to not minimize those experiences—we may not have lost our homes to wildfires or flooding, but we’re all part of the situation and we can see ourselves in the project.”

Chwelos also accompanied Holman to Lytton, where CDP helped create a time capsule to commemorate the 2021 fire that destroyed 90 percent of the small BC town’s buildings in just 20 minutes and made international headlines.

“Going to Lytton brought up a whole range of emotions. We got to go into the townsite, which was terrifying in so many ways,” they recall. “I was in a car with Sean and it was like driving through the belly of the beast: my heart just sunk and we stopped talking as we took it all in. You could see where the fire had gone through, black carcasses of trees, rusted-out vehicles, steps leading to burned-out houses . . . you could still identify lots of items of humanity in all the rubble. There were signs warning us to close our car windows and not turn on the air circulation because there were potentially toxins of asbestos and lead floating around. You really felt for the community and what they’d lost, to see the entire town basically reduced to rubble. It was scary to think that this was probably the first of many towns that will face this.”

Holman with Writing student & CDP participant Sandra Ibrahim

A future of our own making

While both Chwelos and Sherkat are graduating from UVic in June, the work of the Climate Disaster Project will continue as more students in more institutions around the world get involved with the project and collectively contribute to the ever-increasing “memory vault” of survivor stories.

It’s no exaggeration to say that learning about journalism practices, trauma-informed interview techniques, and climate experiences and solutions has changed the way Chwelos sees the world, as they have now had CDP work published in the likes of the Fraser Valley Current and The Tyee, as well as by the International Network of Street Papers.

As Chwelos said to CBC’s Laura Lynch, “It’s shown that when we can come together, there is a lot we can do. We do have the power as we move through these disasters . . . to create new ways of living and create new communities — and build and sustain existing ones — that will allow us to live in more equitable ways and be able to survive climate change together.”

For his part, Sherkat is buoyed by the feeling that he is indeed making a difference with the Climate Disaster Project.

“I think most people just feel overwhelmed when it comes to the climate crisis. On top of policy change, we need a revolution in thinking — everything needs to change,” he concludes. “People my age grew up with the spectre of climate change in our futures: it’s impacted me, and I know it’s impacted the people I’ve worked with, my peers. I feel proud about the work I’ve been doing with the project. That’s enough for me.”